Saturday, March 21, 2015

Small Wonder

Got this as a gift from my wife. I knew the machine would be good, but I wasn't expecting it to be _this_ good! This $200 machine has same snappy performance as my work Macbook. And it manages to do this with a entry level Celeron processor, that's just insane. Boots up in 2-3s and shuts down instantly. The keyboard is good, though the keys aren't very deep. Trackpad is very accurate and smooth, I haven't seen a trackpad this good outside of a Macbook. Even though it has just 2GB ram, I haven't had even a slightest hiccup with multiple tabs/apps running with music streaming at the same time. I think Google has done an excellent job optimizing the OS, so much so that you get the same performance from entry level processors as an i3/i5.

I initially thought that the small size could be a problem, but it hasn't been in my last few weeks of use. The resolution of the display is same as the other machines with 13in displays. I was so enamored by this small wonder that I decided to ditch my work Macbook and tried working on this for two full weeks. And I haven't missed a thing. Attach it to a external monitor and it handles a higher resolution equally well - no hiccups there too.

My only little gripe is that the Cisco VPN doesn't work out of the box (for certain types of authentication, for some others it works). I'm hoping Google or Cisco will fix that soon. But if you're a little handy, you can install crouton and vpnc to get it to work even now.

All in all, things don't get better than this. I haven't been more satisfied with any tech product as this. Tip of hat to Google and Acer.